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Friday, April 18, 2008

Ha!

This one is from Myla Goldberg via the NY Times Review of Books blog, Paper Cuts. Goldberg is the author of the novels Bee Season and Wickett's Remedy (neither of which I've read, but I might now!).

Q:Whose books are generally shelved next to yours in bookstores? How does it feel to be sitting between them?

A: I’m too abashed to seek out my books in bookstores all that often; it feels a little too much like public masturbation. When I do get up the nerve, I just look for the “Memoirs of a Geisha” guy, Arthur Golden, because that book is almost always in stock and facing frontside-out due to the pretty Japanese lady on its cover. She’s my beacon: I look for her, glance to her left, and then slink away, feeling kind of dirty.

Love it. My books would end up on that same shelf, in the 'Gs' - I'd look for The Lord of the Flies cover.

Bee Season was great; I couldn't get very far in Wickett's Remedy, even though I wanted to. I'm not a lover of footnotes and it's full of them (side notes, actually); it's part of the story - kind of a gimmick. I didn't have the patience.

It reminds me of a moment from Gideon Haigh's diary of a club cricket season, 'many a slip'. One of his team mates reported that he'd just seen a copy of 'The Big Ship', his biography of former Australian captain Warwick Armstrong, in the book shop.

'I trust you didn't do anything stupid, like buying it?' Haigh asked.

'No' the team mate replied 'but I did put it back in the shipping section.'

I read this as well and thought it was hilarious. I also loved her quote regarding her use of the internet. She said she used it for the obvious things -- e-mail, research for her books, etc. But, she said something along the lines of (not an exact quote) 'barring the destruction of the world's libraries' she wouldn't be using it for much else. She said she is forced to spend more time online than she wants to now.